Mobisodes

The popularity of mobisodes these days are increasing due to the development of technology. The question here is that ‘are mobisodes stealing the publics’ interest from television content?’. According to BBC News (2006), the size of a television or a computer screen seems to work for the long-form shows such as television series that can last about half an hour or an hour. As for the mobile phone and much smaller delivery systems, it is harder for the viewers to watch their programs in it for such a long period. Honestly, it is quite a hard work to watch ‘The Lord of the Rings’ on your iPod and probably the viewers never will feel right.

Title : Mobisodes and songs can be played in iPod
Source: appleinsider.com

However, as being said above, the popularity of mobisodes is rising. For example, in Korea, there are many Koreans who are watching their desirable programs pf mobisodes up to 90 minutes on their mobile phones everyday (BBC News 2006). In the same article, a principal analyst from Informa, Dave McQueen stated that “TV is a medium that everyone understands, and is mobile”. Nevertheless, mobisodes have some problems of its own too in the very beginning. According to Dawson (2007, p.235), mobile television's hardware aesthetic is pervasive, and has already endangered the establishment of repertoire production techniques that are geared towards small screens, reduced frame rates, short battery lives, and limited storage capacities of mobile television's central artifacts. One of the examples is the making of the ’24 Conspiracy’. According to Dawson (2007, p.236), translating the 24 original series (a profitable multi-media brand) to the two-inch screen required a number of formal and budgetary comprise. The outcome of the ’24 Conspiracy’ was beyond the original production due to the tight budget, unknown actors, and minimal location shots and so on. Moreover, such concessions to the technical limitations of the mobile phone become distractions when the mobisodes were collected as a special feature on the DVD release of the 24’s fourth season (Dawson 2007, 236). Therefore, it is hard to standardise the format of mobisodes from the original products.

Title : 24 Conspiracy
Source: Freewebs.com

Below is one of the 24 Conspiracy episode. As you can see in the clip, the graphics are not as good as the original series and the actors are different too.

Title : 24 Conspiracy: Minute 2
Source: TVheaven.com

Fascinatingly, multimodality plays a role in the mobisodes too. An explanation about how paradigm shift has taken place in the society ever since the multimodality was introduced to us is explained by Walsh (2006, p.24). Furthermore, Walsh explanations was supported by Kress and van Leeuwan (2006) where both authors have the same point of view as Walsh and they also stress out the point on the temporal composition in the film and television.

References

Dawson,M 2007,'Little Players,Big Shows:Format, Narration, and Style On Television's New Smaller Screens', pp. 231-250,viewed on 9th June 2008 at http://con.sagepub.com.ezlibproxy.unisa.edu.au/cgi/reprint/13/3/231

'Future of TV: the production company' 2006, BBC News, viewed on 9th June 2008 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6143350.stm.

Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006, 'Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication',John Benjamins Publishing Company,U.S.A.

Walsh M 2006, ‘'Textual shift”: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian journal of language and literacy, vol. 29, no 1, pp. 24-37.

'World Cup ushers in mobile TV era' 2006, BBC News, viewed on 9th June 2008 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5049698.stm.